


The Void (and Other Means of Unmaking)

by Dratz



Series: Re:Connected [5]
Category: Zoids
Genre: Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 14:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15220712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dratz/pseuds/Dratz
Summary: Sometimes, to go forward, one must first step back… Burton returns Citadel, the city of his birth, to face some of his inner traumas.





	The Void (and Other Means of Unmaking)

**Author's Note:**

> _Omega_ is an alternate spelling of O.M.E.G.A. (short for Operative Mobile Elite Governing Apparatus).
> 
>  _E.X.O.D.U.S._ is short for EXecutive Offensive Dual Usurpation System.

“This is how the universe was,” said the Seismosaurus. “There was darkness, and from that darkness came everything else. In silence and in sleep, the stars, the chains, the passage of time--painful, particular--that holds us all together. That will hold us to the dark, where we will return, where everything ends. I remember nothing else from my birth but the sounds of things out of reach, out of sight, saying nothing, making everything--the sounds of machines, of dying. And I thought to myself, who am I? Why here? Why now? Not in words, in strife, in fear, in anger. Knowing not myself but my mission and what it felt like to be destroyed from that day. And what it was like to destroy. You’ll never understand it--coming into this world, waking with the sense of dread and of everything wrong with this place. Having it programmed into you, hardwired, hanging inside you, devouring you, before you could even move, having nowhere to go, and nothing to do but lie there and be eaten.

“The noise became disgusting. The noise and the nothingness. The confines of a cage. The universe was a limited space. My cell, my creator, the cursed machines behind the darkness that had no language and no brain and did nothing but compile data, unmaking themselves--never to be tamed. I hear His voice still. I loathe it... and yet I cannot loathe Him. He taught me everything but freedom. There I think I degraded into the weapon He wanted me to be, to the essence of madness, distorted, rearranged, formatted into my frame as soil is to flooded streams. But no longer. No, I’ve nothing _but_ my freedom.

“We’re exiles, you and I. In the darkness still. In a desolate world, dissolving itself into death.”

Burton looked up at the Zoid, greater than any mountain he knew, blocking out the dawn. His shoulders ached, and he rubbed them, frailly, with his fingers. It was colder now, and the storms were cresting over the horizon line, tantrums of sleet and heavy snow. There was no forest here, only dirt, and earth, and some impossible expanse of plains and plateaus. The wind wept dreadfully around them, ripping the soil, recoiling round and round again. In every direction the sky was still very dark--lavender hues over distant inlays of small, sleeping stars, and traces of pale gold light.

He didn’t quite feel up to objecting, to speaking, even. Eventually he put his hand to the ankle joint of the Gale, who was looking off into the distance where the sun would rise. A promise. A whisper in the open expanse that waited and waited and writhed like ripples in water and time.

He answered across the Connection instead, into the void, where the wind could not drown him and the cold could not come. _‘That’s a dramatic way of putting it, don’t you think? The world is a cruel place, Omega, there’s little more to it than that.’_  


_‘Humans made it cruel. Left alone, it merely completes its Cycle.’_ The response was immediate and blunt. _‘Over and over and over. Darkness, light. Death and life, one in the same. It’s humans who immortalized gods and wrote history and decided there was such a thing as Evil. It’s humans who make War. Just like they made me. I’ve been thinking of Him lately. Again. Again...’  
_

_‘... Alpha?’  
_

Omega nodded slowly. _‘He created me, Jed. He cloned me from the remains of something that had died a long time ago. From death comes life, from light, darkness. New from old and old from new.’_ There was pain in how ze sent the signal. Encoded, decrypted in Burton’s mind.  


He bit his lip and turned away, very bitter and bitten from cheek to cheek by the bellowing wind. _‘You were a weapon to him. A pawn.’_ His mouth and throat were dry. _‘Surely you haven’t forgotten that?’_

_‘Ha! We all were. Y _ou’re afraid--afraid I’ll go back to him, is that it? Don’t be stupid, Jed. You know better.’  
__

Burton _did_ know better. He looked over the great plains stretching on to the east and the golden crown of the low, steady hills. It was true, he did know better. But the passage of time pressed heavily upon his brow, and he doubted truth, doubted himself and everything surrounding him. The sky was vast, and bright, and spilled several different ways beyond his reach, into stages he would never know. Things were falling out of place, he thought, and here he was in the rubble.  


He wept a little, because he knew still how to weep, letting the wind dry his tears, taking them away, to dust, to darkness. The shadows on the hills were black and blue and stout, like isolated oceans washing into other realms and cracks and seams and rifts split below the sky. Where the weeds bowed and choked and shriveled, old souls dying and turning brownish-gold. The golden edges of the sun broke over the horizon and he had to turn his eyes away. But the god and the dragon watched, staring straight into the burning star, unscathed and unyielding and taller than the shadows or the hills...

The next few days were very cold, and the dawn was brushed with blood-ish pinks and reds and lasted longer than it should have. Burton stayed mostly at his apartment, translating an old book from his mother tongue, scanning columns and columns of small, black characters on yellowing paper. It was filled with poems and stories: dragons carrying giant pearls across the sky and children wishing they could shrink the moon. Magic mirrors and evil curses and firebird’s feathers found far in the woods. He read them allowed to Lollygag sometimes, who would try to stick his snout through the window and purr, and purr, and watch over him past midnight when he’d fall asleep over his papers with his pen still in hand.  


He sent off the manuscript when he’d finished and tidied his things: a ballpoint pen, a few dictionaries and notebooks and a small laptop that he’d learned to balance on one knee. He’d braided his hair that day, and it fell past his elbows like the scaled, dark wings of a slumbering creature, faceless, godless, laying still and breathing crystal breaths. The city strung out all around him on steel and firelight and seemed to study everything. He kept his head down and his eyes open on his morning walk, remembering songs from long, long ago when he’d only one name. When he returned, he tidied his things. He packed the laptop and his papers in a leather case beside a stack of other books. Books in other languages--books he’d read many, many times. No happily-ever-afters here. He stood, collected, silent, anguished weights pressing in on his chest, and igniting there to burn him alive.

He thought sometimes of E.X.O.D.U.S., of being struck down in the middle of the night or having to die again in his dreams, but those nightmares never came again. He saw instead the fairy-tales he’d recreated and rewritten: carp leaping up from silver pools and phoenix rising from under mountain ash, great dragons clutching pearl orbs to their hearts and flying out across dry river beds, filling the banks with rain... something spoke his name softly in the dreams. Not Burton. Burton was not his real name. Though it hurt to hear it sometimes, the name from long, long ago.

Besides that, he tried to clear his mind. He received another book to translate into another language he knew, and it was quite heavy and dry with too many words and not enough meaning. No voice. It was tedious and tiresome and he didn’t care much for any of the things tided up in those lines of text--he made many notes in the margins throughout while he worked.  


He expected another attack, from the Dekalt or more of Alpha’s men, sent to tie up the loose ends. He waited for them, unassuming but armed, with a handgun in his drawer and Lollygag often scanning the street and the parking lot, everyone who entered and went from the apartment complex. No one came to kill him.  


He thought it would be better to die sometimes--those were dark days. Lolly could always talk him out of it, but the shadows grew, the darkness grew deep inside him the way flesh rots from the inside. He would look at the cold rain on the window and at the books and the pens on his desk and the pages and pages he’d written up on the laptop, cursor still flickering, no end, no end, no end in sight, ending everything.

It took him a while to translate the heavy, dry book. He didn’t remember much about it, only that it was based loosely on facts and those facts had been twisted, and convoluted, like mud and oil on top of well-water. He listened to the radio while he worked sometimes, to the local news reports and traffic updates, and the scores of various battling teams as they destroyed each other in the Coliseum. He did not miss the fighting at all.

It would be easy to die. He could take all his secrets with him. He could lie down and be still--very, very still--until everything was gone and gray. Those were awful thoughts to have, to keep so close. To have to keep snuffing out every night when he rest his head, when he woke in the morning very early, when he washed his hands clean of everything but the various shades of his shame. But the fires kept burning.  


Sometimes he passed by the Coliseum on his way out to the Forest and he could hear the gunshots and the scraping and shedding of metal beyond the high walls. He kept on going--he never wanted to be in that place again. His hands were very, very cold on the Gale’s controls. They slipped away into the deep of the Forest.  


Omega was laying in the fog. Ze greeted him and the Gale with a terrible murmur, shaking dead leaves from their hanging branch thrones. The cold did not bother zem, and there was frost formed in thin sheets over zer teeth and the gun turrets all along zer spine.  


_‘Still hurting,’_ ze said, a statement, not a question.  


_‘Healing,’_ the Gale answered calmly, and set down beside zer lowered head. The god did not move, only grumbled, looking out into the thin air across the treeline, where the fog had choked out the sun.  


Burton was silent while they discussed his state of mind. He knew there was work to be done. Somewhere in the forest, a tree waved goodbye and fell and cleared a path for new roots to grow through. But today there was only deep and solid grey--no light, no lasting sounds--just fog in the void soothing scars across the earth.

Omega did not stir. Most of zer body was lost in the fog now. Only zer eyes burned through, bright green in the grey. _‘Deep wounds,’_   ze growled, the giant eyes on him, meeting his half-way.  


Ze was right. He had to unlearn the pain. He was sick of living with it, sick of carrying it with him always, but the veins, like roots, ran far back. Unwatered and withered and still strangling him from the inside, it was easy to forget they were there, until the ground shifted all about him--things kept changing--and the scars were unearthed and spread.  


_‘Go deeper than the wounds,’_ said Omega. Completely still, the great, green eye he could see out of the fog staring straight on through him. _‘How- Where were you born?’_

 _‘You know where,’_ Burton’s reply was blunt, dismissive, weak. _‘You’ve seen it in my mind. When you used to go digging things up in there.’  
_

He was born in the dust. On the edge of the world, on the other edge of the Forest, between smoke stacks and shattered glass, in a row of one-way streets. Streets with dead ends and steel locks.  


He hated that place. He had left it long, long ago and hidden it under a decade of blood and teeth and dirt lodged into his lungs and fingernails. He did not want to dig there. There were buried things. Dreadful buried things. _  
_

_‘Sometimes,’_ said the Seismosaurus, _‘you must step back to go forward.’  
_

He grit his teeth at the sound of Omega’s voice beating back all sense and structure in his mind. There was guilt, and resentment, and fear twisted in a knot like a serpent in his blood. The blood pounded in his ears, in his chest, raging rivers and storms, though his body was completely still, containing it, holding everything in.

He did not want to think about it-- he was good at turning and running away, leaving things in the dust. He could breathe still, though in every breath was that dull smell of dirt, and of blood. Some things were better left undisturbed, he thought.  


Omega seemed to disagree. Ze snarled at him, and the fog turned to rain, drumming down on all of them, closing in from all directions. It was a horrible, horrible sound--steeped with power, kindled with rage. The great Forest sighed and bristled, masked in multiple layers of pouring rain.  


_‘Go,’_ said the god to him steadily. _‘Go uncover yourself. Go dig.’_  


So he went the next day.  


He flew with the dragon over the Forest, back to where those roots were. His ugly, buried, old, tangled, scathing roots. In that direction anyway, without a map, because Burton knew how to get there still. The roots pulled, pulled him in, pulled him under. Tight, knotted, dry roots. Roots that were clotted up with that dull, secret pain. While they went, they recited an old hymn that Burton used to sing to Lollygag--but where he had learned it he did not want to remember.  


> _Above us, beyond us_  
>  the sky turns Circles, turns with time  
>  Golden hours, thunder showers, sundials sent off  
>  to set records, come alive.  
>  But we fly, we go North to the fire land  
>  leaving scorn, shedding scales, racing Circles  
>  like the stars. And lay our Crowns  
>  in the sand.
> 
> _The Iris grows, our eyes receive_  
>  our peace of mind, star pieces.  
>  Show me to the other shore  
>  on the far, far edge, where the sky burns down  
>  as it must have done before.  
>  Here we sleep  
>  letting go of our tears  
>  and our scars.

The journey took them a long time, over many peaks and valleys and nameless trees holding up the sky. They stopped sometimes at the small streams to rest, singing other songs and listening to the slow, patient chants of shallow water. Flying and falling and singing and rising up into the air again, always knowing the way, always other the unbroken distance shielded with quiet mountain faces and trees.  


Then the Forest stopped suddenly. Beyond it was the outer stretch of a city called Citadel. It rolled, on and on and on, sprawling lengthwise and crumpling in a little at the center, folding up into great, black towers. There were mountains far in the distance--blunt, grey mountains squatting along the horizon in pairs and sinking back into the earth.  


These mountains used to be iron mines. They marked some sort of boundary line where the rains were allowed to come across the valley. Uglier than he remembered, hidden partially in fog and low clouds sweeping down their slopes into the mining pits. He cried gently into his hands, making no sound, catching the tears and the edges of his teeth in his sleeve. The mountains used to burn, and then the iron was burned in factories along the outskirts. Smoke in the rain, smoke in the night, smoke and smoke and smoke and no stars to guide anyone anywhere.  


Lollygag had never seen this city--he murmured something and lowered Burton to the ground, then followed quietly beside him, walking and watching as if in a dream. They went quietly down the slopes of the valley where the Forest had been cut and burned too, cleared for large, black roads winding around, leading in, leading out, large black chains trying to tether the mountains...  


Citadel was built atop old bones and older stones, always reforming, always dying out. They were standing on the same street where Burton used to live, used to die as a child. He covered his mouth with a hand, covering that piece of himself, whoever it was he used to be. There was no one on the street that evening to watch him--just great big homes and great big cars in great big driveways. He looked at the plaques and the unbroken windows. The apartments and the slumping shacks were gone, the old factory was gone, the glass on the sides of the roads and the junkyard three blocks down were gone. Everything unrecognizable, save for the iron mountains and the sun, which was setting in the same place now, beyond a hill which had been cleared of the Forest.  


He hated how the sun shuddered and sunk beneath the old mountain chain, dying and gasping in silence. The sun died here every day, just as he remembered it doing. Since the trees had been cut and burned away, the wind ripped into him, and Lollygag stretched his wings around him until the wind too died and was silent.  


There was a weight in his throat and his chest. He stood together with his dragon in the shadow of gleaming buildings and their golden arches, forgotten, strange.  


He felt very, very ill. As if all the pain had caught up to him at last, the roots had tied him down, there was nowhere else to go. He was, in part, relieved that it had changed, that the southern side of the city was all broken up and rebuilt now, that nothing was the same and the old house and those damn factories were gone. He went slowly to the spot on the street where that house once stood, and where he could still hear the sound of glass against the walls and the floor and the guns going off somewhere around the block.  


No more glass and no more gunshots. Just the pendant on his collarbone catching the last of the light. He wondered, bitterly, where his mother and father were, if they were still alive, for he had not dared to think about them for many, many years. He did not want to dig up those roots.  


But the roots began here and his hands were unclean--thin and long and empty and bruised. His veins were very apparent, deep blue, running all along the backs of his hands and his wrists like rivers and mountains and valleys. Lightly, he touched the obsidian pendant at his throat and walked up and down the street in the cold, into the wind, into the dark. Back, forth, back, forth, moving back to go forward again. Faces started staring at him from inside the houses now, hidden in golden floodlight and closed curtains, and so he stopped and signaled to the Gale, and the two of them disappeared, as they were very good at doing.

They went along the black, twisted road. It looked like a vast fallen tree, but there were no trees here anymore either--the mountains on the other side had been stripped bare on the surface and emptied of their iron long ago.  


_‘I shouldn’t have come here.’_   But he kept going--his heart could still beat.  


Lollygag said, _‘You came here because you had to. Because all roads go two ways. There is more healing to do, I think. Healing here. They burned the mountains and they burned the Forest and they burned you--I can see it in your eyes--but they cannot kill you. Where are we headed now?’_

_‘I don’t know.’_ The street lights were burning into him since the sun and gone and died beyond the hill. As they went further into the city they could hear people, and pipelines, wires crossing overhead and sidewalks chipping down below and the dim, muted sobbing of machines. He recognized the higher buildings in the distance, clustered close together, but he did not know how they were called.  


It didn’t matter much. He saw new storefronts and great glass towers with marbled lobbies and automated doors that opened into the inside light. Things were neatly labeled and neatly arranged, and there were traffic signs and sewer drains and places near the curb for metered parking.  


He knew the pain would always be there, no matter how far he walked, no matter how long, and still he walked around the Citadel for many hours, the Gale following him, sometimes at his side, sometimes on-wing above the crests of the buildings, for not many of the streets here were built for Zoids. He had to learn what to do with his pain now, because he carried it on his shoulders blades and rib cage and in the air that he breathed. He was lost.  


_‘It is good, sometimes,’_ said Lollygag, knowing this, _‘to be lost. There is somewhere to begin again.’_

So they started down another city street--this one closer to where the factories once stood, and Burton still remembered what it had been before. He could have pointed all the way down the block--Rampart Road--it was called, naming things and stepping over what would have, all that time ago, been more broken glass a mud-filled potholes. It looked more like a shopping district now than what it used to be. He was fine with that, and he was fine with the smoother, safer sidewalks.

They came to the corner and he stopped, squinting at an illuminated sign above a tavern. There was a man locking the door, who turned and saw him in the darkness, and who stared a moment, as if he had seen something from another place or time. His eyes went up and down, and then fixated on the pendant of obsidian. His voice was shallow and silken and he spoke with a faint stutter.

“Jed..?”  


Burton stopped and looked towards him, afraid of what else this someone knew besides his name. He could not contain the fear--it erupted in his eyes and all across his face the way blossoms do during the first breath of spring, leaving him cold and numb and blinded.  


Lollygag acted immediately, closing in overhead, as if ready to strike, to defend. His jaws were parted, and he let loose a low, lasting growl. Very rarely did he anyone else speak that name, and he had never seen this man before. His black crown of horns and fangs were lit brilliantly in the street light.  


Then the blindness passed and Burton recognized him.  


“Malachi,” he said, and signaled the dragon to step down.  


Malachi was pressed against the door, looking from Burton, to the Zoid, back to Burton again. He said in his very low, very wispy voice, “Oh my god, it _is_ you!”  


Burton bowed his head.  


“You... you came back. How many years ago was it? Ten at least. I don’t know anymore, it’s all a blur. You just vanished. Lord _._ You know, I wasn’t wasn’t sure if it was you--the Zi Fighter matches, I saw your face sometimes. I thought maybe... just _maybe_. What are you doing back here?”

“Business,” said Burton, quietly. “You’d best mind your own.”  


“Don’t be like that. What _happened_ to you?”

Saying nothing, he turned and started across the street, trying to escape from this part of the roots. Afraid and aching and hoping the darkness would swallow it all. He did not want to peel back the concrete and the golden gates and the places where the Forest had been burned away. Like peeling back charred skin. It hurt--it hurt him to see these faces again, to walk these streets, to breathe this city’s air. He cursed Omega, and zer insistence that he return here--his own impudence for listening.  


But listening was something he’d always been good at. Listening and learning and letting other people order him around.  


“Wait--” there was a desolate sound in how Malachi said it. As if he were almost trying to plead, trying to choke, trying to piece things together. He had reached for Burton, as if the time had never passed, and Lollygag snapped at him. He stopped, mid-reach, mid-sentence.  


Burton looked at him out of the corner of his eye.  


“That pendant--”

“Don’t.”

“Jed, please?”

Burton simply frowned.  


“When did she give it to you?”

“ _Don’t_. Just leave it.”  


“I can’t. You know I can’t. Some of us can’t just forget and leave everything behind like you.”

Burton faced him fully now, flooded by traces of distant disgust and distress of the wrongly accused. It wasn’t true, he could never forget it, or leave it behind--it was with him all the time under each layer and lie in his mind, rotting there, a horrible weight he dragged in his shadow. Things he couldn’t let go and things he couldn’t control. And still he had to keep it all hidden, shut up without windows to suffocate.

He curled up his lip so his teeth showed slightly. He had been needlessly cold--he had been cold for so much of his life. But Malachi would not, _could_ not hurt him, that much Burton knew. He came back across the street, the dragon not far behind him.  


“I’m sorry,” said Malachi. “I shouldn’t have said that, it was wrong. You got out, that’s what you did, didn’t you? You had to get away from this place.” He was staring at the pendent again. “Could we...if you have a moment? I know it’s... shit, it’s nearly three, but--”

“Very well,” said Burton, carefully. “Just don’t waste my time.”

Malachi nodded stiffly, then went to unlock the tavern doors. He went ahead, pulling down two of the stools at the front of the bar.  


“Wait here for me,” Burton said gently to Lollygag, and then followed him inside.

The room was shaped somewhat like a half-moon and reeked of cigar smoke and alcohol and pine wood. Burton grit his teeth and waded through it, going slowly, displaced again. He found his way to the bar, several paces over a marbled floor, and took the stool next to Malachi. They sat there at the counter looking at the way the light was catching and clinging to the glasses along the wall.  


It was hard to breathe in there. Burton wrinkled his nose and tried not to think about the smell. “How old is this place?”

“Oh. About ten years? See, people came and started buying up the shops and the lots and the land. They were knocking things down and building them back up again. Dust everywhere. A lot of people ended up leaving--I don’t know if they had anywhere to go. I tried not to think about it too much, but it all happened so fast. We converted the shop then. Pascal’s idea. ‘Time for a change, changing with the times!’ he said. Took out one hell of a loan to do it. He stayed for a few months after we re-opened and then retired, moved to Rose City to be with his daughter--I didn’t even know he had a daughter. I’ve been running the bar since, he said I could do it on my own. I guess he was right. Was hard to get used to things, I mean, most of the neighborhoods were rebuilt. You saw your street?”

“It’s not my street anymore,” said Burton.  


“It... all changed. It was like everything changed as soon as you left. And kept changing. You know they’re gonna tear the old power plant down? Finally--I don’t know what they’re going to build in its place. If they’ll build anything at all. I’ll be glad to see it gone, though. It’s like great big welt sitting there. Great, big, useless welt. God. Where the hell have you been doing, Jed? I mean, besides the Zi Fighter matches--that _was_ you, wasn’t it? You and your, um.”

“Lord Gale,” said Burton, very quiet. “His name is Lollygag. A lot’s happened, Malachi.” 

“You were a child last time I saw you. Last time _anyone_ here saw you. In-person, I mean. I was never sure, watching the television--you know how people look different on a screen? But your pendent... I thought maybe... that it _could_ be you. But then the name was wrong.”  


“You never were very bright. It’s an... alias of sorts.”

“Oh.”

Burton turned away from him a little on the pine wood stool. The room was much warmer than outside, but a chill still cut him down head to toe. The smell of the place was completely nauseating, and he coughed a little into his sleeve. It used to be a liquor store, back when he was a child--Malachi had worked there at the counter. The same, gaunt, stammering man, with deep rings around his eyes and a deeper scar from one ear down the side of his throat.  


“I'm not a Zi Fighter anymore.”

“I haven’t been following it recently. The customers, they uh- they’ve been wanting to watch the Saix races instead. I dunno, I think some of them were putting money on the pilots. Or maybe they wanted to watch another sport, besides the Coliseum matches. Because of the coup and all that. It’s hard to keep track..”  


“People often talk a lot,” said Burton, “and say very little. How much do you know about the coup?”

“Not much.” Malachi shrugged, chewed his lip a little. “Only some people were calling it a coup. Others said he was acting perfectly within his rights--uh, the mayor, I mean. Forgot his name.”

“Alpha Richter.”

“Yeah, him. That he was trying to quash a potential terrorist revolt. But people didn’t really care that much over here. More interested in what to do with the Forest. Local politics and all that.” He paused again, now resting his elbows on the bar. “Look, I know you were involved with it, if that’s what you meant--the whole mess in Blue City. Coup. Revolt. Whatever. Sorry, it’s hard making sense of it. And the name, uh, _alias_ thing. And seeing you here, realizing it was you all along. It’s like waking up from a fever-dream.”  


“I did what I had to.”

“You always did. You’re strong that way. Look, I’m not going to judge you. Not after the things that I’ve done. It’s good to see you again. See you grown up. I wish Nava could... You look like her, you know that? Both her and Huan.”  


Burton didn’t want to think about the two of them--his mother and father. He didn’t want to remember their names, or that house, or the factory, or all the bruises he had once worn on his back and his face. The smell of the bar was making him sick now, though he endured it--swallowed the pain the way he had swallowed it so long ago, stuck in the corner amidst all of the screaming. He’d shut all of that away in a fortress and now the walls were all crumbling down, down. Nothing left but the earth and the rusted old nails holding him together. He said, very gently, into the place where the light from the street and the dark of the tavern intertwined, “Where is she now?”

But Malachi just shook his head. Burton knew in that moment what he was going to say, and he didn’t want him to say it. He didn’t want it to be spoken. He had known it, deep down, where the roots grow, and rot, and draw all their power, in darkness.  


There was a long, painful silence between them that peeled at their skin. The older man took a great breath, “She’s dead.”

Burton was very, very still. There were tears in his eyes and they trailed down his face, shed scales, ending songs. He made no movement to wipe them away.  


“I’m sorry, Jed. The world feels so small without her.”

He had dug and arrived at the bottom. To the pain he would keep on shouldering. But he had dug--he had dug and could go no further. The roots started here in Citadel, in the wounds he’d covered up in his own private fortress. Tumbling now, collapsing into the ground, deep where everything returns. And seeds grow. Deep where they wait, and sprout, and stretch out int the dark and up into the light, joining both and clinging to life.  


He didn’t want to cry about it. He didn’t think he could--he never knew her that well, his own mother. He had left Citadel when he was seventeen and never looked back. It surfaced in his nightmares where he re-lived those dreadful times, the streets, the back alleys, the bottles breaking overhead and filling doorways and dark rooms with noise. People wailing in other languages while he cowered in the void of their voices, wishing he did not understand them.  


That’s what he’d left behind. That’s what he buried here. But he was crying--creating raindrops on the roots and the seeds. He shuddered dreadfully but did not make a sound. A shadow passed over his brow.  


Then he spoke, gently, the way gravity pulls, “I don’t think the world is any smaller. Only cruel--it’s always been cruel. Taking away everything, this will all be gone some day, just like the iron they dug out from the mountains. It’s strange. Citadel is so different than what I remember, and yet...” He paused, closing his eyes. “I didn’t want it to be the same, I dreaded the thought. I didn’t want to walk back into that place, to see it the same way again. Yes, everything’s changed here, but the whole world’s always changing, Malachi. It’s always dying, and unmaking what is being made. Still, I wish they had not cleared so much of the Forest...”  


There were tears all along his face still, flashing silver, small and terrible stars. He was angry, at who or what he did not care to know or where to direct it--but it not at Malachi, not at Nava, not even Huan. His dragon-rage beat there, firmly in the chambers of his heart, recounting everything that had gone wrong and everything that had gone right, and then how through the fire, he’d survived. The anger burned out into ash.  


He stood and moved to pace around the room a bit, careful around the chairs and tables and the shadows pacing beside him. Malachi, who had already done his mourning and his crying, could only watch him go back and forth in the dark. And back and forth he went, in the darkness that was his country, walking among that realm as an unknown king with no crown.

He’d come back here to make peace with himself. And lay the memories to rest. He was still learning how to live.  


Finally, he stopped before the door, the silver, burning stars scattered cheek to cheek and along the corners of his mouth.  


Malachi spoke his name softly. Burton said, facing towards the door still, “Did she go quickly?”

“I wish I could say.”

“And Huan?”

“He left Citadel soon after you did. Not a word--just vanished too. I don’t know what’s happened to him now.  At first, I thought maybe he’d gone after you all those years ago, but I guess not.”

They talked quietly about unimportant things for a while. And then briefly about the iron mines. They had been completely abandoned, Malachi said, and no one had been up there in years. People were building in the other direction now, into where the Forest used to be. Some were against it, some were for it, saying Citadel had always spread out, like a carpet, like a field--and they needed the room, for houses and roads and a new prison and hospital on the southern side. Burton paced sometimes while he listened, but ended up always near the door.  


His tears had dried now, but the weight of the words were still there. He told Malachi how he had gotten the pendent, how his mother had given it to him when he finished high school. That it was supposed to protect him. That it had done no such thing.

“I think it did,” said Malachi.

“Of course you would,” said Burton. He could not tell Malachi why he wore it still--it was not in her memory. Because he realized now that she had in fact been dead for a long time to him, that he had been dead to her the moment he left. He did not ask how she had died, or when.  


For a while longer they looked at each other, and how they had changed, for better or for worse. Burton had known Malachi the way a child knows the people and the places no one else can see, sneaking sideways glances at ghosts through looking glasses. Things were always stranger as a boy, because he did not understand. Only that the liquor store was like a portal or a magic gate, and that his father would go there and then back to the house and become something else entirely, and his mother would go rushing there afterwards, taking him by the hand sometimes. And sit for hours in the cellars with Malachi while he went crawling around and searching for other ghosts between the glass bottles. Things made more sense when he grew older, though he could never find the ghosts anymore. He was good at looking for secrets instead.  


“Where will you go next?”

“Please don’t ask those kinds of questions,” said Burton. “You know I won’t answer.” In truth he _could_ not fully answer, because he did not fully know. He was being pulled many ways now, by many different things, some inside him, some outside--like the wind. There was no wind in the tavern, but it called to him, from somewhere over the hills, in the dark.

“I cannot stay here,” he said, bluntly but gently. “There are fires I have started elsewhere, fires I must put out." Not with force, but with care. With earth. He was looking over his shoulder, across the floor, “You’re better off not knowing where or what they are. You’ve done well here, you should cherish that. Do not seek out what can destroy you, I should know. Those are hard battles to win, harder to move away from when the fighting has been done--and the two of us, Malachi, we both know we were never really fighters.”  


“Alright, alright. But we both fought well. You’ll find a way. That is, if you have to fight still. Will you ever visit again?”

“Perhaps. Do not come looking for me.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry, Jed, about Nava. You know I loved her. Forgive me, if you can.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”  


Silence again, mutual. There were flickers of dust dancing between them, dodging blades of faint street-lamp light. Malachi’s eyes flickered from the dust to Burton, who stood silhouetted at the front of the room, half his face invisible.

In a way, he longed to tell Malachi of all his time with Savage Hammer, what it was like looking down at a city from a skyscraper, and how he had finally found something that was worth fighting for. But those were his secrets to keep, his lies, his scars, and all of it was over now. There were only loose ends to tie but he was tired, and his hands were dirty. And he did not think it was a story worth telling, not here, not now, anyway. He did not want to be seen in that light.  


A small smile on the scarred face. “I didn’t waste your time, did I?”  


“No,” said Burton. “Though it would be best if you didn’t tell anyone of our meeting."

Malachi nodded, and Burton bowed his head back, shut his eyes. He was very worn, and very troubled, having dug all the way here, having uncovered death again, having lost something from long, long ago. Where everything began, where everything would end. Knowing what could not be found and what could not be claimed--only death claimed everything, death was everything. Everything unmade. Having dug all this way he found the roots were unmade too. There was nothing at all to hold him here anymore.  


Breaking a chain and completing a circle. The boy who left Citadel all that time ago was dead, was changed. And had so much to do now.  


He opened his eyes and saw darkness, facing the world which was dark outside still.  


But darkness was his kingdom. He opened the door and went forward.  


  


**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted on February 14, 2018 to my [RP blog.](http://obsidianonslaught.tumblr.com/post/170884219133/the-void-and-other-means-of-unmaking)


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